Monday Morning News

A Beijing court has overturned a ruling that the design of the iPhone 6 copied the design of a Chinese phone. Apple appealed the original ruling, allowing sales of the iPhone 6 and 6s to continue, and now a separate Beijing court has overturned the original decision, finding in Apple’s favour. With more and more smartphones sporting curved edges and rounded corners, is this the kind of thing we’ll see more often? Sure, maybe if companies want to go through the same legal rigamarole that Samsung and Apple did, back in the day.

Some chunks of code in the latest iOS 10.3 beta suggests that Apple is looking into higher refresh rates for the iPad Pro display. Current iPad Pro refresh rates operated at 60Hz, while the Apple Pencil polls at 240Hz. It’s unlikely that we’ll see a 240Hz display on the next iPad, but it’s possible that we could go higher than 60Hz for more fluid Apple Pencil interaction.

A “what’s new” splash screen in the latest tvOS 10.2 beta lists new features on the Apple TV, including a “remote control from iPad”. The problem with that is, the new Apple TV Remote app only works on the iPhone, and while the older iTunes Remote does work on iPads, it doesn’t offer the same Siri or touchpad input that the Apple TV Remote app does. There’s a good chance that will change in the future.

You’ve probably seen mockups of the Product(RED) iPhone 7 with a black front plate. But one YouTuber took it a few steps further, buying both the red iPhone 7 and a Jet Black one, then swapping the entire display assembly and logic board of the black iPhone 7 into the red one. I’ll admit that the result looks pretty good, even if it does come at the cost of a truly busted warranty and water resistance. I guess if you had a friend who wanted a panda iPhone, and you wanted the black and red one…

Drake’s More Life project has broken streaming records on Apple Music, surpassing the previous record held by Views, and also scoring 89.9 million streams in its first 24 hours (more than Ed Sheeran’s Divide on Spotify, which holds the record for most streams in the first week). So how did it do it? According to The Verge, it all has to do with Beats 1 and OVO Sound Radio — despite Apple Music having around 80 million less users than Spotify, Drake’s radio show is where it’s at.

Speaking of iTunes, Casey Newton’s meticulous music-listening system, built on iTunes’ song-rating and Smart Playlist features, is quickly becoming a house of cards. Syncing a bunch of individually star-rated tracks and smart playlists is become more and more precarious with every iTunes update, and Apple’s solution of just subscribing to Apple Music eschews the kind of music eccentricity that few understand.

The Mac Observer claims the iPad mini is on its deathbed, due to a lack of updates. If that were truly the case, then I’m sure we will see it eventually killed off, but for now, it’s hard to know what Apple has waiting in the wings for its smallest tablet.

AppleInsider has a round up of the best calendar apps for the iPhone. Fantastical is great and all, but these days there are some very compelling alternatives.

New location sharing features in Google Maps include a find my friends-style feature, as well as one that shares your current trip information, which seems like it could come in handy if you’re doing a long drive and have someone waiting on the other end.

A collector’s cache of Apple II floppies was recently unearthed by Jason Scott. In the interests of preserving computer history, Scott then went about to archive the entire lot, copying them into a more modern format using an Apple II and floppy disk drive. The total size of the vast majority of about 350 5.25-inch floppies? About 37MB.